Got an email message from Youtube that reads: “We are inviting you to pilot a new Youtube feature that allows you to add helpful notes to videos. These notes will provide additional information and create a better informed Youtube Community. How this works: When you find a video that might be confusing or inaccurate, you can submit a note clarifying it. Your contributions will be reviewed by others with a wide range of views to ensure their quality and helpfulness before being added to the information panel below the video. Together, we can make Youtube even more helpful for everyone.”
I’m not sure why, but I’m getting bad vibes
Google is outsourcing their job to you, because you doing it for free is even cheaper than paying some poor fellow in India a dollar a day.
And if you’re wrong, they can’t get sued.
Youtube community notes sounds not that bad on paper.
I’m excited to see how they fuck it up.
Allow me to translate:
We are inviting you to work for free because our content moderation team isn’t focussed on actually moderating harmful content… Well, only if you define “harmful” as “harmful to advertisers’ brands.” And by “moderation” I mean adding notes to things a la twitter, or X or whatever… Doesn’t matter, we just think that Elon was onto something when he outsourced the responsibility of fact-checking to unaffiliated users who can be duped into free labor as long as we dress it up as “making the community better” (like we actually have a platform that actually fosters anything close to a “community” lol). Hopefully you’ll steer unearned traffic towards incorrect information so we can make the case to those users that YT is OK with that kind of content without having to say the quiet part out loud, and make the case to advertisers that it’s worthwhile to stop caring what kind of content their ads get placed near. Your contributions will be ignored by the general public, especially those who are seeking out inaccurate content, but you’ll get the feeling of superiority that comes with hitching a ride on the coattails of someone shittier, yet vastly more popular than you could ever hope to be. Together, we can make Youtube even more money.
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